FRIENDS OF MUSIC: KERIMOV TRIO

Kerimov Trio provides an evening of highly enjoyable chamber music. (Review by Michael Green)

Standing in at short notice for a pianist who had cancelled, the Kerimov Trio provided an evening of highly enjoyable chamber music for the Friends of Music audience at the Durban Jewish Centre.

The trio consists of Elena Kerimova (violin), her husband Boris Kerimov (cello), both of them prominent members of the KZN Philharmonic Orchestra, and Christopher Duigan of Pietermaritzburg (piano), who has been a busy concert pianist for nearly 20 years.

They formed their trio nine years ago, and their close understanding is apparent in everything they play. For this programme they chose two major works and a variety of attractive fairly short pieces.

The main substance was provided by Mozart and Beethoven. Mozart wrote about 20 trios for piano, violin and cello and the one played here, K. 548 in C major, written in 1788, is not, I think, very widely known. It is delightful, with many glimpses of how advanced a composer Mozart was for his time, or indeed for any time. The first movement is bold, the second eloquent and expressive, and the third tuneful and brilliant.

The performance was outstanding. Boris and Elena are highly accomplished string players, and Christopher Duigan extracted a full tone from the Friends’ elderly piano.

The concert ended with Beethoven’s Trio in E flat major, the second number in Op. 70 and as good, in my opinion, as the much better known No. 1, the Ghost Trio. This splendid music has a rich and varied texture, and provides constant thematic and rhythmic interest in its four movements. The playing was excellent, though I would have preferred a somewhat more deliberate tempo in the opening Allegro ma non troppo. The suave, flowing third movement and the vivacious finale were delivered with insight and panache.

The smaller pieces included three Ave Marias, enough Hail Marys to keep a monk happy. Two were arrangements by the Kerimov Trio: the Gounod Ave Maria (itself a rather syrupy adornment of the first prelude in Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier) and the well-known Schubert song.

The third Ave Maria was the one attributed to Giulio Cacchini, the 16th century Italian composer. This music had a late rush of popularity about 20 years ago. It doesn’t sound 16th century, and it is now believed that the actual composer was a Russian musical hoaxter named Vladimir Vavilov, who wrote the piece in 1970. All very odd, but the music is attractive and not particularly pious, and it was played with enthusiasm and affection.

A similar story is attached to the famous Adagio in G minor attributed to Tomaso Albinoni (1671-1750), Albinoni’s Adagio. Albinoni was a Venetian baroque composer who wrote more than 50 operas, and it was long thought that this piece (usually played by organ, violin and strings) was rescued from the ruins of Dresden after the Second World War and was arranged by the Italian composer Remo Giazotto (1910-1998). It is now believed that there was no discovery in the ruins and that Giazotto wrote the piece himself. Why he didn’t take the credit is anybody’s guess. Never mind, the music does have a baroque flavour, it is elegant and dignified, and it was well played on this occasion.

The concert programme was completed with a typical toe-tapping, catchy composition called Escolaso by the Argentine Astor Piazzolla, the king of the tango, and Max Bruch’s celebrated Kol Nidrei, a Protestant composer’s tribute to Jewish religious ritual.

The evening’s Prelude Performer (funded by the National Lottery), was the 23-year-old Durban tenor Lukhanyo Moyake. Accompanied at the piano by Andrew Warburton, Lukhanyo Moyake performed three songs by Verdi, two arias from Rigoletto and an item from the Requiem, which I recently saw described (correctly, in my opinion) as Verdi’s greatest work. This young singer, a music student at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, displayed a powerful, resonant and accurate voice and a good stage presence, confident without being overbearing. He deserved the warm applause he was given by the audience, and we will follow his progress with interest. He should have a bright future in the challenging world of operatic and concert singing. - Michael Green